There is nothing new or novel about the fact that a fired cop will grieve his termination and the case will go to arbitration. There is nothing new or novel about the fact that the arbitrator (or three-member panel, as it’s usually constituted), based on the precedent of how the police department dealt with other cops before, will determine whether to sustain or reverse the termination.

What is new and novel is that the New York Times managed to pen an entire editorial calling for the end of this process without ever noting the real reason why this happens.

These cases also demoralize mayors and police chiefs who have worked hard to remove problem officers, only to face orders from unelected arbitrators to give those abusive officers their badges and guns back. It doesn’t matter how much a police department overhauls its use of force policy, or how strictly a police chief enforces those new rules if unelected arbitrators reverse the punishments of officers who violate the rules.

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It was going to save us. Even Jake assured me it would when he invented the Sentence-o-Matic 1000. There was a problem, and everybody “knew” it: judges were awful and racist. They were awful and racist when they set bail. They were awful and racist when they imposed sentence. They were awful and racist in between, too, but it was easier to focus on bail and sentence because both involved numbers, and we could compare numbers because they were numbers. And numbers don’t lie.

Was there ever a task in the courtroom more ripe for automation?

As a representative of the ignorant masses, I find comfort in the notion that everyone would be given sentences using the same criteria, and never again subjected to the whimsy of some of the judges.

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How do you prefer your word salad? Apparently, it’s a matter of your social class, according Nick Clairmont, who is kind enough to explain “wokese” to those of us who are merely fluent in English.

As a language, wokeness is self-consciously engineered to be easier to exploit and use to bully your way to the top if you are a member of a “marginalized group” (to use woke parlance). That is, in a community where everyone speaks wokese, the intention is that a trans woman of color will have her ideas advanced and her enemies thwarted, and will generally be advantaged by the milieu she finds herself within, because that is how the rules are structured.

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The argument was that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” with a claim that 93% of the Black Lives Matter protests were not about violence and looting. It was an important argument, as it sought to calm concerns that protests were not only doing inexplicable damage to innocent lives by burning down buildings and destroying livelihoods that people, regardless of race or ethnicity, spend their lives building, but violently attacking individuals who got in their way.

Peaceful protests garnered support. Violent protests, looting, lost it. But violent protests caught people’s attention. Violence imposed a cost on the “normies,” whether by destroying their businesses or costing them peaceful sleep in their suburban homes. Peaceful protests might be annoying to the extent they close down roads and denied them to other citizens who had the right to use them, but violence made headlines. Continue reading →

Wednesday, I remarked that this week’s “debate” looked like two old men with delusions of being professional wrestlers attempting to cut promos on each other. This was especially troubling for the President, who’s actually in the WWE Hall of Fame. For those of you unfamiliar with that tidbit, no, I did not make that up.

So today we’re going to discuss the fine art of cutting a promo. Let’s be realistic, we’re not getting any actual debates out of Trump or Biden. If they’re going to trade insults they need to do it in an entertaining fashion that actually draws people in. Continue reading →

It’s been one of those mornings when my posts rang hollow, even to me. I’ve already trashed three because they ranged from pedantic to polemic to petty. Nothing worth your time to read.*

There has been a nagging concern about what’s left after Trump, as our institutions are condemned and hated by both right and left. Like it or not, Trump will eventually go away, maybe sooner rather than later, and we will be faced with the question of whether to return to normality, a nation with deep problems but, on the whole, pretty damn good, or a burned out shell of a society at war with itself and each other. Continue reading →

The allegory of the Emperor’s New Clothes has such ubiquitous application these days as to be rendered trite. Yet, its message still matters. When used in favor of the loudest screamers on social media, it gets applause, but that’s not really the message. It’s safe and easy to agree with all your pals. It’s hard, almost impossible, to say out loud what the passionate masses don’t want to hear.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett did that in Doe v. Purdue. KC Johnson* did that in the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading →

As nominations for the Supreme Court coming from the Trump administration go, Judge Amy Coney Barrett is pretty darn good. Her ruling in the Purdue Title IX case was exemplary. Her position on civil rights is strong. How she might rule on the ACA or abortion remains something of a mystery, but the assertion that she is a guaranteed vote to end them is wildly speculative, as she has made clear that she strongly believes in the legal doctrine of stare decisis.

Hey, Trump could have nominated Jeanine Pirro. And as much as Merrick Garland has been idealized by the Dems because of the offensive Republican refusal to give him a vote, he was no great hero of liberal jurisprudence. Judge Barrett wouldn’t be Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but then, no one would expect Trump to nominate a Justice Ginsburg, and it’s hardly clear that if the next Supreme Court justice were nominated by Joe Biden, the person would be any more Notorious than Barrett. Continue reading →

It was a shitshow. Worse than that, because it can always get worse, there was never a chance that it would be anything but a shitshow from the outset. Trump came in with the purpose of proving to his hard core right wing fringe supporters that he was the tough guy they so admire in him. And when asked by Chris Wallace, who was completely incapable of reining in Trump, to condemn white supremacy, the most Trumpian of things Trump could say came out.

Stand Back. Stand By.

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The idea of a grand jury moving for the disclosure of the grand jury transcript is simultaneously bizarre and interesting. By law, they are sworn to secrecy for sound policy reasons, and since their role is not about them, they have neither a right nor interest in challenging the law. Yet, a grand juror in the presentation against the cops involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor got a lawyer and made the motion.

The unnamed juror filed a court motion on Monday seeking the release of last week’s transcripts and permission from a judge to speak publicly to set the record straight. Hours later, the office of Attorney General Daniel Cameron granted both requests, saying that the juror is free to speak and that recordings of the session will be made public.

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